CentOS is a free clone of Red Hat, it’s missing some stuff (satellite for example) but it does the job for learning. You can find it in many places, for example here: http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/Linux/INSTALL/Centos/6/isos/x86_64/

IP Routing and NAT

The part “Routing / NAT” will be tricky, as I do not have a second computer that I could use for this. Maybe I can get something working inside the virtual machines though, but for now I think I will skip these two and get straight into the other ones.

If you wonder about things – check this fairly unreadable blog post out.

Basically you want to use the $RPM_BUILD_ROOT in front of where you want to install the software. By default there are ‘make’, ‘configure’ and nothing in the ‘require’ entries. I removed the make, configured and just put ‘bash’ in the require entries, it seemed to do the trick though.

More info is also available on rpm.org – which recommend to use /usr/src/redhat for building packages.

Configure a system as an iSCSI initiator that persistently mounts an iSCSI target.

Waiting with this. Need to set up an iSCSI target first.

Produce and deliver reports on system utilization (processor, memory, disk, and network).

sar -A

/etc/cron.d/sysstat

Use shell scripting to automate system maintenance tasks.

Well, this can be a lot of things and is quite hard to prepare for.

But I think a ‘for loop’ is a good thing to know about and can help with a lot of system maintenance tasks.

Of course, you could also use the ‘newuser’ command (interactive or send a file).

This happens a lot I think: You get an idea that “hey, I can do this with a script”. But then a random amount of time later you find out that there is already a command that does this for you. That doesn’t mean the time spent is a total waste, hopefully you learned something while doing it. Maybe your script even does a better job than the new one you found.

Configure a system to log to a remote system.

syslog / rsyslog

man rsyslog.conf has an example for how to log to a remote machine

edit /etc/rsyslog.conf

add

To forward messages to another host via UDP, prepend the hostname with the at sign ("@"). To forward it via plain tcp, prepend two at
signs ("@@"). To forward via RELP, prepend the string ":omrelp:" in front of the hostname.
Example:
*.* @@192.168.0.8

Set the IP to the machine that will be receiving the logs.

Configure a system to accept logging from a remote system.

So this step you may want to do before the previous step (unless you already have a working syslogd server).

To test try to “su -” with the wrong password and then check in /var/log/secure on the loghost.

Create a private repository

“To create a private repository you should proceed as follows: – Install the createrepo software package – Create a <directory> where files can be shared (via FTP or HTTP) – Create a subdirectory called Packages and copy all packages to be published in Packages – run createrepo -v <directory>”